


Filigree and Destiny

by eternaleponine



Series: Clexathon 2016 [13]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/F
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-12-26
Updated: 2016-12-26
Packaged: 2018-09-12 11:48:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,761
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9070354
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eternaleponine/pseuds/eternaleponine
Summary: When a soul is separated, the pain of one will be written on the skin of the other, until they are made whole.Or, Clarke and Lexa have both had weird designs show up on their skin, seemingly at random, their entire lives, and they have no idea why.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Thprocrastinationmaster](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thprocrastinationmaster/gifts).



The designs had always been there, for as long as Clarke could remember. Not constantly – they came and went – but from her very earliest memories, the lines had swirled across her skin from time to time, lingering for a few hours or a few days and then fading away again, leaving no trace that they had ever been there. 

At first her parents had scolded her for drawing on herself, and when she'd denied it they'd scolded her for not telling the truth. Then when the lines traced over parts of her body that there was no way that she could reach on her own, they scolded her for allowing someone else to draw on her... and when she denied _that_ , well...

Eventually, they stopped scolding her for it. They stopped mentioning it at all, and sometimes she thought that they'd forgotten that it happened at all, until one bloomed across her face, curving over the bridge of her nose and under both eyes, and there was no way to hide it.

The girls at school whispered, and from what she could hear some of them thought she was being ridiculous and some of them thought that it was kind of cool, actually, kind of pretty... and then the next day a few of them were sporting designs of their own, drawn on with whatever they could find in the art class supply cabinet. 

The trend lasted longer than the marks on her face did, but not much longer, because most of the girls' parents made them scrub it off as soon as they saw it. And so Clarke's tenure as an accidental trendsetter was short-lived. 

Sometimes Clarke traced over the lines, loops and whorls that looked like some kind of lace, but lace that was made up of the tiniest blood vessels, because the designs were always in shades of red, from deep burgundy to faint pink, and wondered where they came from, and why she seemed to be the only person she'd ever met who had them. Sometimes she thought that maybe others had found ways to conceal them and that's why she'd never seen them on anyone else, or maybe that she simply hadn't met the others who were like her, because she didn't know _everyone_ on the Ark, of course... but as she got older and met more and more people as they came through medical, she really started to think maybe she was unique.

She scoured everything she could find about Earth, wondering if maybe it was some sort of genetic anomaly from back before the end of the world that the people of the Ark thought that they had eradicated, or even people before them, but that had managed to pop back up in her. She found nothing, and eventually she gave up searching...

... until one morning when she was fourteen and she woke up covered nearly head to toe in blood red filigree. It traced its way up all four of her limbs and across her belly and chest, bloomed on her cheeks and chin, and then, as she looked over her shoulder in the mirror, she watched it march slowly and deliberately down her spine, from the nape of her neck all the way down until it disappeared in the waistband of her pants.

"Clarke!" Her mother rapped on the door. "You're going to be late."

"Um, just a second!" Clarke called back. "I just, uh... just..."

"Clarke, now!"

She hastily finished dressing, and tried to comb her hair to cover the worst of it, but of course as soon as she sat down for breakfast her father reached out to push her hair back, because he hated when it was in her eyes and he couldn't see her face. "Good—" he started, but he didn't finish. Instead, he sighed and shook his head. "This again?"

"I'm not doing it!" Clarke said. "I've told you and told you and told you, and you never listen! Why would I do this to myself? And if I did, why would I lie about it? If someone tells you the same thing every time something happens for their entire life, don't you think maybe at some point you should start believing them?"

"If you're not the one doing it, then who is?" her mother asked.

"I don't know!" Clarke snapped. "If I knew that, don't you think I would make them stop? Do you think I _want_ to go out looking like this?"

Her father sighed again. "I guess you have a point," he said. "But it's not like you have a choice."

"Well, you _could_ get me excused from class for a day or two," Clarke said. "Or Mom could. She could just say I'm sick, and they can just send me the assignments and I'll do them on my tablet. I'm ahead in all of my classes anyway."

"No," her mother said immediately. "I'm not going to lie for you."

"It's not a _complete_ lie," Clarke said. "I _am_ sick. Sick of being stared at, and having people whisper about me behind my back."

Her father coughed to cover up a laugh, and her mother glared at him. Still, she relented. "One day," she said. "You get one day, and you're going to show me your completed assignments when I get back from my shift. Understand?"

"Yes," Clarke said. 

"Okay." Her mother sent a message over to the school, and then left for work. 

Her father finished up his breakfast (or what passed for it – it was the same carefully formulated, nutritionally balanced stuff they ate for practically every meal) and kissed the top of her head as he headed for the door. "Have a good day," he said. "Stay out of trouble." 

"I never get in trouble," Clarke said. 

"There's a first time for everything." 

As soon as he was gone, Clarke went back to her room and found a sweater with a hood, and again arranged her hair to cover as much as she could before heading out. The library computers had access to more files than she did on her personal tablet, and she _needed_ to get to the bottom of this, and _soon_. She was absolutely certain that if she could just find the cause, she would be able to make it stop. 

She logged in at one of the terminals and began to search, the terms she used getting wilder and more desperate as she ran into one wall after another after another. And then as she scrolled through some article about ancient earth folklore, an illustration – or was it a picture? – caught her eye. She began to read.

The article linked to another, and she kept clicking through and clicking through, hoping against hope that one of them would say something different, or that this whole preposterous theory had been debunked, or at least say that there was some way around or out of what she was reading... but there was nothing. Just the same assertion, over and over again: When two halves of the same soul are separated, the pain of one will be written on the skin of the other until they are made whole again.

She finally just shut down the computer, her head aching. She propped it in her hands, and in doing so caught a glimpse of the tracery around her wrist. 

If all of this was true (which of course it _wasn't_ , because there was no such thing as soulmates, it was as ridiculous as all of the other myths that the people of Earth had dreamed up, but if it was...) then Clarke was left wondering just one thing: If all of these marks were the pain of her soulmate, her other half... what the _fuck_ had happened to them?

* * *

Costia traced the faint pink lines that circled Lexa's wrists, lifting one and bringing it to her lips, pressing a kiss to the soft skin there. "Where do they come from?" she asked. 

"I don't know," Lexa answered. "They just come, and then they go..." She shrugged and rolled over, pulling her arm away so that she could prop herself up on her elbows and look down at her lover. "Does it matter?"

"I was just curious," Costia said. "I've never seen anything like them."

"They've always been there," Lexa said, then frowned slightly. "I should say, I've had them show up for as long as I can remember. Not often, but from time to time."

"They remind me of something," Costia said, "but I can't think of what." 

"You think too much," Lexa said. "Let me help you with that."

Costia laughed, but she let her curiosity be kissed away, at least for the moment. 

She didn't ask about the marks again that day, but the next time one showed up, Lexa could practically see her thoughts racing as she tried to remember what it was that they reminded her of. 

"It's a book," she said. "I'm sure it's a book..."

"You and your books," Lexa teased as she ran a stone down the blade of her sword, trying to smooth out a nick in the metal.

"Someone has to tend to them," Costia said. "Just as you tend to your weapons. It's a miracle that any have survived this long. Who knows what we might lose if we don't try to preserve the ones that we have? Those who don't know their history are doomed to repeat it."

"Did you read that somewhere, too?" Lexa asked. 

"Something very like it," Costia said. "I'm going to find it again," she added.

"The quote?"

"No, the designs. I'm going to find them. Don't you want to know?"

"You know I'll listen to anything you have to tell me," Lexa said. 

"I know." Costia wrapped her arms around her from behind so that she wasn't anywhere near the blade that Lexa held (how they had ended up together when Costia abhorred violence, Lexa still couldn't figure out), and pressed a kiss to her temple. "I'll be back later," she said. "Hopefully with good news."

But she didn't come back. Not later. Not ever. At least not all of her.

It was a challenge from the Ice Nation, a test of her resolve to unite the clans. Would she stay true to her stated goal, or would she choose to retaliate instead, to get justice for the act of cruelty that they had subjected her beloved to? She knew what they wanted her to do. She knew that the Ice Queen wanted her to demand blood for the blood that had been spilled. Lexa knew that Nia wanted the chance to prove that she was weak, that she could not stay the course, and if possible, to kill her. She couldn't become the Commander herself, but if someone else took her place, she might be able to get her hooks in and manipulate them. 

She knew what Nia wanted. She knew what she, Lexa, wanted. But what was best for her people? What should she, _Heda_ , want? 

She went to the library, seeking the wisdom of those that came before her, not the guidance of the Commanders that came in dreams that wasn't ever as clear as she wanted it to be, but in the written words of those who had lived before the world ended, who had waged their own wars and forged their own peace. 

What she found was books scattered across the floor, knocked from the table in the struggle that had ensued when they had come to take Costia. She hadn't gone easily, and Lexa took some grim satisfaction in that. Costia had not been a warrior, but in the end, when it mattered, she had fought. 

_Do not go gentle..._

The words echoed in Lexa's head, a fragment of something she had read, maybe, or something that Costia had whispered to her once. A poem, probably. She had loved poetry. 

Tears pricked at her eyes and she blinked them back. There was no time for tears. 

Lexa crouched and picked up the books, stacking them carefully on the table because she didn't know where they were meant to go, and it felt wrong to put them back anyway, erasing Costia's last actions, last search, as if it had never happened.

Once book had fallen face down but open, its pages crumpled beneath it. Lexa picked it up and tried to smooth them, and found her fingers brushing over a picture that looked far too familiar. She pulled her hand away as if she'd been burned and turned to look more closely. 

Her forehead furrowed as she read the words around it, and read them again, and then a third time before she gritted her teeth and forced herself close the book. 

She left without even looking for what she had originally come for, because she knew that there was really only one choice she could make. Only one choice that would honor Costia's life. The next day she announced that they would not seek vengeance against the Ice Nation. Instead, she banished the Ice Queen's son, the heir apparent to the _Azgeda_ throne, and said it was enough. It wasn't enough. It would never be enough.

The choice haunted her, and Costia haunted her, but maybe most of the all, what she'd read in that book haunted her. _When a soul is split in two, the pain of one will be written on the skin of the other, until they are made whole again._

It was just a story, some ancient fairy tale that had been recorded and somehow managed to survive all of these years. It wasn't true. Lexa knew it wasn't true... because Costia had never had a mark on her.

* * *

When you found yourself sentenced to a year in solitary, with no one to talk to except the occasional guard, who wasn't interested in conversation anyway, you had a lot of time to think... and not much else. They gave her books sometimes, on a tablet that had been completely disconnected from the ship's network so there was no possibility of her contacting anyone. When she was especially good, and asked nicely, they would give her charcoal to draw. She drew on the walls and the floor, and she would have drawn on the ceiling if she'd been able to reach. She drew Earth, what she remembered from pictures and drawings and what she just imagined... and what she dreamed. Vivid, breathtaking, heartbreaking dreams of a place so green it made her eyes ache, the atmosphere so full of oxygen she thought her lungs might burst...

And sometimes she drew the designs that appeared on her body, trying to find meaning in the patterns where she could see and study them even after they had faded away, but if there was any kind of rhyme or reason to them, she couldn't work it out. 

She tried not to think about what she'd read in that file that one time, back when she was still young and innocent, back when she was just a girl and not a prisoner, not a threat to the safety of everyone on the Ark, apparently, because she might tell them the truth that her father had been stopped from telling. She tried not to think about whether, when she banged her elbow or smacked her shin in a moment of clumsiness, someone else would know about it, would see it like she saw it when they did the same. Most of all, she tried not to think about who that person might be, and what they would see when she turned eighteen and they floated her.

Because she knew that they would float her. She knew that there was no chance when they reviewed her case that they would find it in her favor. She was as good as dead already; it was just a formality that they were keeping her alive long enough to pretend to hold another trial. Not unless somehow they found a solution to the leak of oxygen that was slowly – or not so slowly – killing them all. Not unless what she knew, what they feared she would tell people, was no longer a concern. And that wasn't going to happen, because if anyone could have found a solution, it would have been her father. If he couldn't do it, no one could. 

And yet still some tiny part of her clung to the hope that maybe, just maybe, they would.

But then her cell door clanged open and they forced her against the wall, too soon, she still had a month, and she tried to run because there was no way they would take her quietly... 

_Rage, rage against the dying of the light..._

Then her mother was there, hugging her, holding her as they tranqed her, and the last word she thought she heard was Earth...

And then she woke up on a dropship, plummeting through space, and she was so grateful to be alive, to have a second chance... but then they hit the ground and what she had dreamed of for so long quickly turned into a nightmare.

* * *

They were resilient. Lexa had to give them that. These people who had fallen from the sky, all of them young, none of them with any experience of life on the ground, they were determined to live, by whatever means necessary. She could respect that. Which was why she agreed when one of them, the girl who many believed to be their leader, the one they called Clarke, asked for an audience.

She peered at herself in a scrap of mirror, tracing black lines over her face, her war paint that today also served to cover up the gray swirls that marred her face, under one eye and over her temple. They'd gone away almost completely for some time, but in the last few weeks they'd been showing up more and more. 

Mask in place, she waited for her supposed counterpart's arrival. She twisted her knife in her hands, not even bothering to look up at her at first, not wanting her to think that she was more important than she was. "You're the one," she said, "who burned three hundred of my warriors alive."

"You're the one who sent them there to kill us," the girl – Clarke – said. 

Which was the truth, of course, and despite Indra's insistence to the contrary, everything else she said seemed to be as well, or as least something close to it. But when she claimed that she could turn Reapers back into men... that was not something that Lexa could or would accept at face value. So she demanded proof...

... and proof was provided. Not without complications, but it was provided. They had brought Lincoln back from a fate worse than death, and Clarke believed that they could do it again for others. It didn't prove that the Sky People could be trusted, and she was sure that plenty of her people would argue against any kind of alliance with them, but what Clarke said made sense, and Lexa was nothing if not pragmatic. It was far easier to win a war when you were not fighting on two fronts, and the enemy of your enemy is your friend, at least for a time.

So she offered a truce, asking only for the life of the one they called Finn, who had killed eighteen of her people, innocents, and it seemed more than fair to her, and the only bargain that she could strike between mercy and strength as her people understood it, but even then the Sky People refused, trying to find some way around it.

Until Finn handed himself over, showing more sense than she would have expected, but guilt was a powerful force, and when it is your life against that of hundreds... sometimes even the worst people can make the right choice. 

It was cruel, perhaps, to set up the place of execution within full view of the Sky People's camp, but they had to see. They had to understand. They were not in charge here. This was not their world. If they wanted to live, they had to live by the rules of her people, however harsh they might be. 

But of course it couldn't be that simple. It never was with these people.

She heard murmurs outside of her tent, heard people whispering that one of the Sky People dared approach, uninvited. She turned to look and saw Clarke walking into the point of Indra's spear, and Lexa honestly wasn't sure how far she would have gone if she hadn't intervened and let her approach. Clarke begged for Finn's life, as Lexa expected she would, and then offered her own instead, which she hadn't. But Finn was the guilty one, not Clarke... at least in this. And Clarke's life was too valuable to waste; she was smart and she was strong, and whether the Sky People knew it or not, she was the only one who actually seemed to have any grasp on the reality of the situation. Finally, when it was clear that Lexa could not be moved from this course of action, that this was not a battle she could win, she made one last plea: the chance to say goodbye.

Maybe it was stupid. Maybe it was soft. But this boy meant something to Clarke, and she could at least give her the chance that she'd never had. So she let her go... and when Clarke ended his life, she risked the ire of her own people in declaring it enough, because once again Clarke had proven that she understood better than any of the rest of her people how things worked, how they had to work, that rules could be bent but not broken. Unless they were going to slaughter them all (and Lexa was trying to avoid that, however it might seem to the Sky People) she needed Clarke alive.

Call it instinct, or intuition, or both or neither... but somehow she knew she _needed_ Clarke alive.

It was only when she finally got a chance to rest, when she stripped off her armor and everything underneath to at least make an effort to clean herself of days of dirt and sweat, that she noticed the black swirl just below her breastbone, in exactly the place that the spear had broken Clarke's skin, that she realized why...

... and just how completely and utterly screwed she was.

**Author's Note:**

> This prompt came from a Tumblr post that was shared with me by [Thprocrastinationmaster](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Thprocrastinationmaster/pseuds/Thprocrastinationmaster).
> 
> And yes, this is more of a first chapter than a complete story, because my brain apparently does not know how to do short. Damn brain.


End file.
